Via Free Republic
In a big win for property rights and due process, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill yesterday to curb an abusiveand little knownpolice practice called civil forfeiture. Unlike criminal forfeiture, under civil forfeiture someone does not have to be convicted of a crime, or even charged with one, to permanently lose his or her cash, car or home.
The newly signed legislation, SF 874, corrects that injustice. Now the government can only take property if it obtains a criminal conviction or its equivalent, like if a property owner pleads guilty to a crime or becomes an informant. The bill also shifts the burden of proof onto the government, where it rightfully belongs. Previously, if owners wanted to get their property back, they had to prove their property was not the instrument or proceeds of the charged drug crime. In other words, owners had to prove a negative in civil court. Being acquitted of the drug charge in criminal court did not matter to the forfeiture case in civil court.
[AlAhram] With Egypt's presidential campaign entering its second week, rival candidates -- former military chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi -- have spent the last seven days unveiling their electoral platforms, hoping to widen their public appeal and win over converts from the opposing camp.
Controversial statements on press freedoms made by El-Sisi on Thursday may have had an opposite effect, however, costing him the support of rights advocates and some liberals.
The former defence minister and current presidential candidate El-Sisi on Thursday warned top editors of Egypt's main newspapers against pressing for freedom of speech and other rights, adding that media freedom should take into account national security. El-Sisi urged editors to focus instead on rallying the public behind "the strategic goal of preserving the state."
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05/19/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[Dawn] IS the pie fight within the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain an outcome of muscle-flexing or a shift in the militancy scenario? More importantly, what role does power and money play as the proscribed turban organization extends its network to lucrative urban areas?
Fazlullah lacks the credentials of his Mehsud predecessors.
Power transfer is not a new issue within TTP ranks. It started soon after the death of the TTP's chief Baitullah Mehsud in a 2009 drone strike. The ensuing confrontation was finally resolved through a compromise in which the newly appointed chief Hakeemullah Mehsud made Waliur Rehman his deputy. Soon after the deaths of both TTP commanders in US drone strikes, however, the fault lines reappeared.
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Perhaps I'm not quick enough, but I would like to be the first to not welcome the landslide election victory of India's new "Hinduist" prime minister-elect, Narendra Modi. Democracy has done it again, and I gather they are dancing in the streets at Delhi, as "the people" are wont to do, whenever they have decisively achieved some profoundly stupid result, that is going to cost them big. (I had the same feeling, albeit slightly milder, when Americans were congratulating themselves for electing as their president a certain Barack Hussein Obama Soebarkah, back in November 2008.)
The immense victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party is, as the saying goes, "Bad news for Jews." Actually, this is not said, for there are so few Jews in India, and the clever hack pundits of the world instead opine that it "may" be very bad news for Muslims. We will see how bad, soon, as the new government handles the police. For the police are never popular when defending minorities from majority mobs; and governments never popular when they are telling their cops to do the right thing.
There is, or at least was, however, a flourishing Jewish community in Bombay ("Mumbai," according to the Hindu nationalists); even more flourishing and numerous Zoroastrians; and the Armenians there, but even more in Calcutta ("Kolkata"), are also close to my heart. I pray they are small enough to become invisible, when they keep their heads down, the way Christians try to do in Pakistan (and Bangladesh). The Christians in India, as too the Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, are sufficiently numerous to make hiding difficult. Whatever they do, the Christians in particular will be accused of illegal proselytizing among the Hindus, whenupon there is invariably hell to pay.
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#1
That was before one party decided that their strategy of divide and conquer to attain power was more important than the country itself. Power and party first.
#2
P2K, you omit that the "one party" contains both Democrats and Republicans. Its the party of big government, and cronyism - where laws are passed to reduce competition and confer advantages for favored businesses, and government takes a hand in everything as a result. The faces of both political parties are just that - a face, stamped over the same material, like 2 sides of the same coin.
#3
Yeah, as I was reading that, the same thing occurred to me. Which party is he talking about?
They are virtually the same in my mind now. At least in this respect.
#6
In their mania or zeal to forcibly unilaterally impose OWG + [anti-US?] Globalism-Socialism on the US while also bypassing the Amer Voter, the same have not only empowered but also nuclearized, etc. very potent, dangerous + ambitious dynamic forces which would also easily destroy them.
Again, as perhaps most recently illustarted by whats hapening on Mindanao in the PHIL, where the Commie NPA in North Mindanao is fighting to stave off the final death throes of its movement, while the Muslim MILF in South Mindanao is firmly entrenched + getting MilPol stronger.
IRONY, LIKE PAYBACK + MORONIC SELF-EXTINCTION, IS A BITCH.
Washington Free Beacon's take on the silliness that is American liberalism and its declining rag, the New York Times. An excerpt:
What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics--Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor--and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the "inescapably gendered aspect" of the Times' latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world's most important newspaper are basically children. You should read the whole thing.
It might have been a more effective metaphor for the last Godzilla movie, released 16 summers ago in the year global warming stopped - or "paused". Do you remember that one? They began showing the trailer the previous summer (1997)â the usual brilliant two minutes, featuring one of the film's better vignettes: some old coot, fishing off the end of a rickety wharf, suddenly gets a nibble on his line; as he struggles to hold on to his rod, the sea swells and the jetty begins to vibrate; Japan's most famous movie monster is about to arrive in Manhattan:
Godzilla. Size Does Matter. Coming in Summer 1998.
Audiences whooped and cheered and roared their approval. The studio, having spent $140 million making the film, spent not much less on the campaign: absolutely everyone â according to the newspapers, magazines, radio hosts and TV shows â was dying to see what Godzilla looked like, but the producers were keeping him under wraps; there were stories about people close to the project trying to sneak out designs, and some fellows leaked models of the action toy tie-in which proved to be false. Kodak (remember them?) built their summer ad campaign around a guy trying to get souvenir snaps of the stompin' lizard.
And then the film opened. And everyone who went on that opening weekend said actually, you know, it was kinda boring. By the second weekend, it was dead. Godzilla came ashore and fell flat on his face.
#1
I saw Godzilla on Saturday. Yeah, there was a mine and people were working there. I didn't get the fact that they were slaves. I didn't know that was legal in the Philippines. I thought they were people who had jobs so they could buy a home and feed their families. Silly me. I actually liked the movie. The special effects were brilliant and the plot was OK. I mean, you don't really expect that much of a plot for a Godzilla movie, do you?
Damn. Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the movies.
#2
From what I hear about the movie it is more of a you can't fight nature and American Military are heroes type movie. I suspect the director got flack and has been inventing this global warming hogwash so that he isn't disinvited to dinner parties.
#4
so, I went and enjoyed it. It was almost empty in the theater, 9:45 showing on a Saturday night. 18 bucks a ticket for IMAX 3D in NJ.
Reserved seating, had to bump two guys out of my seats. tequila made me pushy for a 5'2" over 50 gal!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
